A Disease Most Deadly
by ClockworkAssassin
Summary: The brief tale of a kenku assassin, and the infection he is sworn to cure.


_A/N: I wrote this as a backstory piece for one of my recent D&D characters, and decided to share it here. It is written in a slightly different style than my usual work, as I was trying something new, but I hope you enjoy! It may be helpful to read up a bit on the curse of the kenku in D&D lore if you're not familiar with it, to better understand the story. I also elaborate more on the idea and backstory of the character at the end if you're curious._

* * *

The streets are quiet tonight. The moonlight shines dim between the clouds, and the city inhales and exhales with soft, rustling breaths; the gaslight flickers with each heartbeat of feet on cobblestones and murmured voices, the exchanging of words and coins, the rhythm of life in the city. And in the shadows, nestled in the shade of the _palazzo _and watching the crowds, sits a kenku.

He is large, for a bird-man; he towers almost five feet standing on all claws, dwarfing his flockmates, but now he is hunched over and silent, and so he is almost invisible in the gaping mouths of the gaslit shadows. He wears heavy, obscuring clothing and rough-shod studded armor pieced together from scraps, and this, together with his tattered old gloves and stained leather boots from the charity house, gives him a humanlike appearance, so that those who glance his way might mistake him for a short, strange-looking man. He wields daggers stolen from rubbish piles, and he is swathed in a black-and-gold cloak whose hood swallows his face, only the shiny tip of his beak poking out. _The tall one, _they call him, _the one without a face. _His old flockmates, who have seen the bite of his blade and know the disease of death he brings, call him Plague.

But today Plague is not killing. He is watching. He watches the people who slip by, observing everything with keen, knowing eyes; he sees what others do not, including the shiny jangle of full money pouches at belts and the secret whispers of scandalous dread. He flexes his clawed fingers, hidden in his patchy gloves, and if not for his perfect stillness this could be mistaken for a gesture of impatience. But Plague is infinitely patient, as all effective assassins must be, and so he waits.

He waits until the crowds dissipate and the gaslights dim, and the cloak of night falls over the town with a smothering finality; and only then does he break his statuesque silence and rise, in a soft, measured motion, and slip towards the front door of the _palazzo. _He knows exactly where he is going, and after many days of watching how this place operates, he knows how to get in.

There is a malfunctioning arcane lock on the front door. He once listened to the guards complain about it, in their high, rough, drunken voices as they stood around chatting and guzzling forbidden flasks of dwarven ale at night. He has captured many voices in his lifetime, and heard everything from shrill shrieks to dull groans that rattled his spine, and learned to tolerate most of it – but their voices and their mannerisms, slurred and coarse and crude, he did not particularly care for. "Bloody hell," one of them grunted, in a pebbly, irritating arpeggio. "Stupid fuckin' door opens by itself sometimes, I swear on my ass. Gonna get chewed out for it sometime."

"Who gives a shit? Boss don't care. He don't care about anything." The other guard spat out a mouthful of goblinweed on the sidewalk with a wet _splat, _and fumbled impatiently in his pocket for more. "Stupid bloody nobles. Don't give a flyin' fuck about anything that ain't two feet in front of their noses."

"Amen to that." The first guard closed his eyes. "By all that's divine, I could use a drink. Want to head down to Marge's real quick?"

"Read my fucking mind, Dave."

Yes, Plague learned many things that night, and among them was the fact that the two staggering idiots who worked this shift on Thursday nights, a fat coarse bloke (Dave) and a churlish goblinweed addict (he hadn't yet learned that one's name) who were too dense to even notice a man standing in the shadows watching them in plain sight, often slunk down to the tavern for a drink, a smoke and an ill-advised break on their shift. Which, of course, gave him a perfect opportunity.

Tonight he takes it. He touches the lock on the door, and with a gentle push of his gloved palm, it swings open. No alarm – just silence.

He slinks inside and shuts it behind him, and there he stands in the entrance hall, looking around. He has not truly ventured inside this place before, for as long as he has stared into its windows and counted its servants, and it is considerably more grandiose than he imagined; plush red carpets, an enchanted mural of stars shimmering on the ceiling, a sweeping white marble staircase that leads up to the second floor. He considers his options, and then carefully ascends the staircase, his claws soundless on the carpet – as anticipated. Nothing has occurred yet which he has not tirelessly prepared for, nothing has deviated from his expected plan, and still he is watchful, keeping his gaze flicking about as he steps up to the second floor and observes the three doors in the hallway to his right. The first, he knows, is the master bedroom of the lady and lord; the second is the bedroom of their only son, Rowan, who is presently away on business and will therefore not present any problems to his mission. The third room he has not received information on, but he imagines it is some kind of spare bedroom for guests.

He approaches the first door and softly presses up against it, listening for movement. He hears the faint snoring of the lord from within, and the soft whistle of the wind rattling the windowpanes; but otherwise, it is silent. Quietly, he pushes open the door.

The moonlight falls upon the lord's face, half-concealed by the pillow and fast asleep; his arms and legs are tangled up in the blankets in a most ignoble fashion, and his royal pajamas are rumpled and stained with wine. Beside him is his wife, the lady, also asleep and clad in a soft blue nightgown; her back is turned to Plague, which gives him pause, but her slow, even breathing tells him she is not awake – or at least, she is doing an excellent job of pretending.

He moves slowly inside, laying each step down with care; each movement now is as precise as possible, to make the smallest amount of sound he is able. As he nears the slumbering lord, he reaches into his cloak and withdraws a long dagger, and pauses for a moment to reflect on this scene. He remembers a story from his youth, a tale of a terrible sickness that has infected the world. It is a sickness that twists hearts from good to evil, turns men greedy and vicious and spiteful and fills them with hatred, and it cannot be cured, only purged from the world. And after every sick man is put to the blade, the world can start again, with pure, clean souls who know only goodness and love. Each time before he kills, he thinks of that story, the plague that he was born to cure, to quell any trembling in his talons when he strikes.

He buries the knife up to the hilt in the nobleman's chin, and the man gasps awake, eyes opening even as he dies. He jerks once in the blankets, then slumps and is still. In one quick motion, Plague withdraws the knife and slides it into the noblewoman's back, and watches as she also twitches and dies. He calmly tugs it out, cleans the blade, puts it back into his cloak, and then, with great haste, exits the scene, knowing that the guard patrol could return at any moment and be struck by a passing fancy to look inside the house. Time is ticking away.

He shimmies out the window, lands expertly in the grass, and walks briskly away from the house. He knows where to go now. He always goes there after he kills here; it is one of his safe houses in the city, and as he rounds the corner, walks briskly down the street and ascends the doorstep, he can already feel the presence waiting for him. Silently, his companion opens the door, and he enters and listens to it close behind him with a long-imitated _thunk._ And then they are alone in the dark.

_Hsss. _His companion sparks fire in his fingers and lights a candle. The glow illuminates Plague in an eerie orange mask, and he knows how he must look in this light: a staring, cold-eyed kenku, a sight to be feared. But his companion is never afraid of him. They are both faceless ones.

"It is done, then?" his companion asks, and Plague delights in the sound of his favorite voice of all – rich, melodious, full of secrets.

He nods.

"Good." His companion sets the candle down on a bookshelf, above the little cubbies full of books and arcane scrolls. "Come. Sit."

Plague sits down on a chair, and watches as his companion settles down in the seat across from him, and moves aside the scroll he was studying. It is a familiar ritual, to sit down like this and discuss a kill after the deed is done, and Plague waits politely as his companion takes off his mask and sets it down on the table, and smiles wanly at Plague, and yet again Plague is reminded that he is the only person in the world to whom his companion shows his face. Indeed, it is a face that makes lesser men recoil in fear, and perhaps that is why he chose to become faceless, like Plague; the left side is a man with a twinkling brown eye and a pleasant smile, but the right is burned and pitted with scar tissue, the hardened remains of a dreadful wound from his childhood. It has made many flinch away, and it it what drove him into this masked, silent life of hiding and solitude. But Plague does not flinch at anything, and perhaps, he thinks, that is why his companion has grown so fond of him.

"Speak," his companion says. "Tell me how you did it."

Plague utters a low, cackling laugh, like a kookaburra. This is always his favorite part.

First he makes the sound of soft, sneaking footsteps on cobblestone, and then the _click _of the broken lock opening. Then he mimics the slithering of an animal on carpet, followed by the muted _creak _of the bedroom door, the _shink _of his knife, and the running footsteps of a cheetah. Finally, he makes the muted _thump _of his claws landing on grass, and the _creak _of the door to the safe house.

His companion nods, following the narrative closely. "I see," he says. "Did you get them both?"

Plague nods.

"Excellent. You do not disappoint." His companion takes out a deck of tarot cards, shuffling them between his hands with quick, expert swipes. "I will tell our client that her needs have been satisfied. Would you like your next contract?"

Plague hums an affirmative. Then, for the first time, he speaks in words; for much as his companion only removes his mask in Plague's company, Plague does not speak for anyone except his friend. He is a kenku, after all, and his voice is a frightening patchwork of stolen and remembered voices, collected from all across his travels over the course of their mercenary crusade. Much like his companion's burned face, it terrifies those who are not familiar with it, who do not know the curse of the kenku.

Now, he chooses the deep, rumbling baritone of a dead man, a nobleman he slew many cycles ago. "Who is next on the chopping block?"

His companion smiles wryly. "I would not put it quite so indelicately," he says. "But no matter." He picks up a scroll and unrolls it for Plague's inspection. "This is your next target."

Plague leans forward to study the face on the parchment, ingraining its every detail into his memory. "Name?" he asks, in a husky fisherwoman's voice.

"Kelvin Iron-Hand. His brother tracked us down, and apparently he wants the man dead over an inheritance dispute. He's paying handsomely." His companion shrugs. "I did not press."

"Odd choice," Plague notes, in a mismatched quilt of stitched-together voices; women, men, girls, dragonborn, children. "To choose the faceless ones for such a mundane task. I am used to much better prey."

"Far be it from me to ignore a thick purse. It'll buy us food for months." His companion smiles wanly. "Of course, if you'd rather have a more interesting challenge, I can do it myself and save you the trouble."

"No." Plague takes the scroll and touches it to the lit candle, and together they sit and watch as it coils up and burns into ashes; they are both strict in their traditions, and it is always customary, no matter how minor the contract, to destroy the evidence of accepting it. "He is mine now."

"Very well." His companion rises from the table, putting his mask back on. "I will see you in the morning. May the silence guide you."

"And the shadows watch your feet," Plague finishes; it is their customary farewell.

As always, he is greeted with the consequences of his contract in the morning, when the citizens whisper of murder and the newspapers are splashed with news of the noble couple's death; it will surely cause chaos and confusion in the political landscape for years to come, and the guards will try yet again to track him and his faithful companion down. But the faceless ones have nothing to fear. They never have. Plague is an assassin, after all, and he cares little for who or what he kills, as long as he gets the satisfaction of killing and his companion gets paid for it. For both of them know, in their own little way, that Plague does not do these contracts for the money.

He, like all the other members of the holy Temple of Azor'alq, does it to cure the disease. For his god of light and purity teaches that sin cannot be converted or redeemed, only destroyed; and Plague is more than happy to do the destroying. The noblemen he has just killed were sick people, truly; they were infected long ago, and beyond redemption. He saw it, and knew what had to be done. He sees it in everyone he kills – the disease. The _disease _that he is destined to destroy.

And he will do it again, every time he receives a new contract for a new infected soul, for as long as it takes to purge the plague of sin from the world. He will not let anything stand in his way.

* * *

_A/N: An explanation of the character if you are curious._

_Plague is a kenku rogue with the assassin archetype. He was kidnapped as a hatchling by a cult of Azor'alq, the god of purity and light, and raised to have their beliefs. The fact that he worships a god of light seems to imply that he uses his skills for good, to kill evil people for the greater good in a heroic fashion… but I hope you realized as the story went on how incredibly twisted this character's worldview actually is. He believes strongly that sin is a disease and it needs to be purged, and he thinks he is only killing sinners who deserve to die… when in reality he's just mercilessly killing everyone, finding some minor sin they've committed and using it to justify them being "infected" with the disease (since everyone has done a minor sin at some point). So he appeared to be Lawful Good at first when I played him in the campaign, but was later revealed to be Lawful Evil when his screwed-up worldview became more apparent. He's a lot like SCP-049, the Plague Doctor, which was the inspiration for his name, worldview and character design. I had a lot of fun playing him. Might write more stories about this character later on if anyone is interested!_


End file.
